What’s Your Verbal Logo?

When you are in business, it’s really important to be able to tell your story well—it’s both an art and a science. To do this effectively, I find it helpful to have a good verbal logo.

The key to a verbal logo is to focus on the benefits—not the features—of what you do. For example, when people ask me “what do you do?”, I could say, ”I help run an online bookkeeping service,” but that doesn’t really compel the average cocktail party guest to ask more, does it? What I say instead is, “I’m in the business of saving people time,” and that never fails to hook people… they are inevitably compelled to ask, “geez… how do you do that?” And once you have people curious I find the conversation has a lot more momentum… and once you have momentum your correspondent will indulge you with their attention and their time and you’ll have the opportunity to describe what you do in Technicolor. Once you can do that you’ll be remembered for sure, and chances are whomever you are talking to will be well enough informed to refer people to what you do—and that’s when you know you’ve hit it out of the park.

Depending on my mood and the company I’m keeping, my verbal logo tends to vary and that makes things fun for me.

So… what’s your verbal logo?